Iíd been driving past this rock, near Hanksville, for years. Itís just begging to be climbed. Iíve even walked around the thing a couple of times, but dismissed it as impossible without drilling huge numbers of large holes for spikes (rebar? footing stakes?) of some kind. The ďrockĒ appeared to be too soft and flaky to nail, too crumbly to bolt. There were a few traces of seams, but crumbly and vague, leading into blank shields of peeling pastry. A untidy frustration, at the back of my mind; that damn thing is right by the highway, flaunting itself.

Last year, yet another token reconnaissance, to laugh at this ridiculous tower, was different. Itís easy to read the hard rocks, like granite, but reading the hieroglyphics of of the more esoteric desert rocks takes more time and practice. Previously, just a few words here and there made vague sense. Last year, words became sentences, then whole paragraphs jumped into a kind of structure. Of course, once you learn to read, you have to work out what itís saying, all the way to the end. So in May last year, Chip and I returned with huge piles of gear, and started up a prominent crack on the south side.

Hereís the formation, back right:

Itís not changed much in 50 years:

This is what we found close up:

I started off the ground, and this is Chip on the second pitch. I elected to belay from the ground, so as to out of the way of any falling debris, so this is taken with a telephoto lens.

A view of Chip from further out from the cliff:

Chip actually hammered in a couple of texas tacks on his pitch.

We left, and came back next weekend to finish. It was hot, 95 degrees in the shade, of which there was none. It was my lead, but up on the climb was actually better than being broiled at the reflector-oven base. The last pitch was a doozy, starting with tipped out #5 Camalots under a temporary-feeling flake roof. After a while, the crack turned to dust, twigs and dead insects, so I started nailing Toucans straight into a calcite seam in the flake, hoping that the whole thing, trembling with the hammer blows, would not fall off, with me under it. Hereís looking down from near the summit.

Hereís a neat calcite seam placement: a stacked Toucan.

At the top, there was nothing to anchor to. With about 2 hours daylight left, I spent about one hour enhancing a natural bollard, and we ended up leaving part of my lead rope as the rap anchor:

I bet if you stood downwind in a clean white shirt on a windy day, the summit would be yours anyhow!!! Technical grade should replaced with a FLEA (Formation Life Expectancy Adjective). One Kick'll Do'er sits at the top of the scale!

Me getting started, note old Chouinard ice hammer, the perfect tool for this kind of terrain (even with half the pick worn off).

Hereís a bashful Camalot, embarrassed to be involved in such shenanigans...

And a Toucan half buried in the crack:

Higher up was a horizontal, where a #5 Camalot just barely stayed in a shallow horizontal slot with the cams actually working to hold some fossilized Ryvita crackers in place. When the cam came out, the flakes fell off. No pics of this.

About 100 feet up was a perfect 3.5 Friend, way deep in the crack, plus a 6-inch long bolt, in pretty good rock, to provide a belay. Still, I elected to stay on the ground, and Chip had to put up with the extra weight of the rope. He got his revenge for the third pitch, where he too stayed on the ground, while I wrestled with 150 feet of extra rope, before I even got going. his is the view from that belay station:

Hereís another calcite seam placement high on pitch 3.

And a view of the upper part of pitch 3, with Chip cleaning. Scary taking photos, slightest careless movement could set off lots of flakes.

The view from the base, with the nearby Henry Mountains:

The thing was 210 feet tall, we reckoned. The end of pitch 2 has two okay bolts and a rap anchor. Rating about A3... give or take.

In high school and college, I used to "stress test " any prospective girlfriends by taking them rock climbing.

One girl, who really did turn out to be a winner and I climbed a sandstone pinnacle at the Peshastin Pinnacles in Eastern Washington called Trigger Finger in 1972.

This was a free climb ,about 5.7 , maybe 50' tall to a tiny summit just big enough to sit on. It was a classic little crag, perched on a high ridge with great views of the Cascades to the west and the desert to the east.

A few years later, I went back and found that the whole pinnacle had toppled over, broken clean off at ground level.

The girl had gone off to follow more sensible pursuits.

Some of my most memorable climbs were on loose, scary choss formations.

You're giving me an identity crisis though. For years I have been motivated to climb desert towers and the loose rock and mud never bothered me. I got excited and wanted to climb every choss pile that I saw written up on the Internet.

After reading your report, I had a great feeling of anxiety and trepidation. It occurred to me that I might not want to climb that thing. I tried to tell myself that I was just being weak and that it's a sweet looking formation that begs to be climbed. Still, the feeling remained. Now I can't decide if I'm nearing the end of my mud days or if you're just pushing farther into that sick realm than my little, Ohio-born noodle can handle.

I miss the good old days when climbing in Dabneyland, the Mystery Towers, or the Valley of the Gods seemed like the chossiest sh#t I would ever have to climb. :)

F*#king Mancos Shale. Hanksville. Caineville. A purgatory of choss, heat, crazy Dennis at Luna Mesa with his UFO abduction stories, oh man what a unholy mess of a place to climb. This whole thread is just so wrong. Hold me, I'm scared.